Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online

to her like this. Then he pushed the thought away and held her close to him.
    They made love
    Stomach to stomach, mouth on mouth, his feet across her shins and wrapped under her feet. Her hands on his back. His hands stroking her ears, his forearms on either side of her shoulders, like the forepaws of a hound. He could smell her excitement, and he bent his head to kiss the bolts of her collarbone.He was in her, fused to her spine, so that the tip of him felt every vertebra, it seemed. He counted her to himself, travelling upwards, into her mouth, so that she could speak him. She said his name – Babel. Travelling upwards so that he could lie behind her eyes and peep at the world through her. He looked at himself through her eyes – his neck, his chest, his eyes full of love. Was this him – through her eyes? Gentle, ardent, hesitant a little, his skin unwritten but filling up with this new language?
    She turned him over. She sat across him. All of him was still. He let her move on him, and he didn’t understand when she took his hand and began to use his thumb, just above where he entered her. He let his hand be taught, and later, lying back, she taught him again, with his fingers this time. He was excited, happy, and when she fell asleep, he propped himself on one elbow, uncovering her, stroking her, memorising what he had learned.
    And then the thought came again, like a bell out at sea getting closer; a warning bell, a ship arriving in the fog. Yes, he could see it clearly now.
    He had not been her first lover.
    What other lovers did she have? What other beds burned in dark rooms?
    He did not sleep.

Tell me the story, Pew.
    What story, child?
    The story of Babel Dark’s secret.
    It was a woman.
    You always say that.
    There’s always a woman somewhere, child; a princess, a witch, a stepmother, a mermaid, a fairy godmother, or one as wicked as she is beautiful, or as beautiful as she is good.
    Is that the complete list?
    Then there is the woman you love.
    Who’s she?
    That’s another story.

This way to the Cobra. Wonders of the East!
    It was 1851 and they were in Hyde Park.
    Dark felt like a man raised from the dead.
    He loved the noise, the excitement, the programme sellers, the postcard sellers, the unofficial stalls, the rogues in red neck-cloths, all chicanery and tongue-twisting. There were card sharps, jugglers, arias from the Italian opera, sign writers who would paint your name next to a gaudy impression of the Crystal Palace. There were miniature train sets that pulled wagons of dolls, and there were women dressed up as dolls, selling violets, selling buns, selling themselves. There were hawkers on boxes offering the best, the finest, the one and only, and there were girls who walked on their hands.
    There were horses in heavy gear drawing beer barrels, and a man with a panther offering the Mysteryof India, and all this before they had queued to enter the Crystal Palace to see the wonders of the Empire.
    It was their honeymoon, Dark and his new wife, though their honeymoon had had to be postponed because Dark had fallen ill as soon they had been married.
    Now he was well, and wearing his Man of God clothes, he was respectfully motioned through wherever he went.
    His wife was tired – she preferred life plain – and so Dark found her a chair and went to fetch each of them pork pies and lemonade. The Queen had been seen eating a pork pie, and suddenly they were fashionable. Rich and poor alike were eating penny pork pies.
    Dark had paid his money, and was balancing the pies and the stoppered lemonade bottles, when he heard someone say his name – ‘Babel’.
    The voice was soft, but it cut him cleanly, the way dressed stone is cut cleanly, and part of him fell away, and what was underneath was rough and unworked.
    ‘Molly,’ said Dark, as evenly as he could, but his voice was edged. She was wearing a green dress, her red hair wound in a plait. She was carrying a baby who put her hand out to Dark’s